Another "Humanitarian" War

The Balkan ghosts of the ‘90s are back: no-fly zones, the White House’s humanitarian war, Europe and the United Nations, guarantees that U.S. troops will not be deployed and an air offensive that alone cannot alter what transpires on the ground. The speeches are repeated and Yugoslavia’s destruction is brought back to mind with macabre images. This time the target is Gadhafi’s Libya.

Using the legal terms by which the international community recognizes that a war is underway, the U.N. decided to protect civilians and create a “sanitary line” surrounding the pariah country — in this case Libya — as Tarak Barkawi, professor of international studies at Cambridge, aptly reported in an analysis for the Institute for Policy Studies.

But there are too many echoes of the terrible wars resulting from the partition of Yugoslavia, when the idea that a population could be bombed for humanitarian reasons was introduced. Killing to defend human rights was sanctioned — an atrocity protected by the Western powers under the discredited U.N.’s umbrella.

The language of the liberals prevails. When the president of the United States, Democrat Barak Obama, stated that the international community could not remain passive given the brutal attack of a tyrant against its people, he was specifically referring to one person: the Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. And the U.N. Security Council, genuflecting, offered its beatific protection only to certain civilian Libyans, but not to Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians or Bahrainis, even less to those who suffer violence in the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe or in so many other places. The rain of bombs was thus secured. The modern crusader’s war started, and the images of suffering were evident on the world’s television channels.

Right now, there are 32 conflicts in the world similar to those of Libya. In dozens of places, a despotic government subjugates and exterminates a people, a tribe or whoever thinks differently, but the powers look to the other way.

The liberal war idea — the use of force for humanitarian purposes — continues and is established as a new paradigm in this new century. Liberal war is useful, especially for European neocolonialists, because it denies that it is a war. It is a no-fly zone to protect human rights, although civil casualties continue to swell the obituary column.

To fight for democracy in Northern Africa, war is the worst method. Bombings, far from feeding the wave of democratic uprisings in the Arab world which has already toppled two puppets from the West according to the Arabs, will result in a major slow down, since from now on it will put in doubt what interests it really defends: those of oppressed people or those of old Western powers.

The war in Libya will lead to more suffering, more refugees inside and outside Lybia and further clashes. It will intensify the situation and hamper settlement of the conflict. We already have ample experience of other recent interventions of Liberal powers on behalf of democracy: Iraq and Afghanistan to name but two.